Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank

Felix Weinhardt () and Richard Murphy

VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: This paper establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has long-run impacts on later achievement that are independent from underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we examine a setting in which the same baseline score on a national tandardized test can correspond to different ranks among students situated in different primary school classes, where we calculate ranks using this baseline score. Institutional factors cause students to be re-assigned to a new set of secondary school peers and teachers that are unaware of the student's prior ranking. We find large and significant positive effects on test scores and subject choices during secondary school from experiencing a high primary school rank, conditional on the underlying primary baseline score. The effects are especially large for boys, contributing to an observed gender gap in end-of-high school STEM subject choices. Merged survey data suggest that the development of confidence is a likely mechanism.

JEL-codes: I21 I28 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/145626/1/VfS_2016_pid_6534.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank (2020)
Journal Article: Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank (2020)
Working Paper: Top of the class: the importance of ordinal rank (2020)
Working Paper: Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank (2019)
Working Paper: Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank (2018)
Working Paper: Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc16:145626

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